Magnet Schools: A Tilted Playing Field

Earlier this month, I stood at my mailbox, a letter from Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Student Integration Services in my hand. Inside was the verdict on my daughter’s application to a well-regarded magnet school. Steeling myself, I ripped open the envelope. Rejected! “Yes!” I thought, elated.

Like hundreds of other parents, I had gamed the magnet system--and won. Getting turned down was, in my case, part of a long-term strategy for eventually getting my daughter into her school of choice in a system that was designed to help minority kids out of overcrowded, substandard schools, but which has morphed into a form of education poker.

In fact, poker is the first thing that came to mind when UCLA economics professor David Levine, at my behest, applied his expertise in game theory to L.A.’s magnet point system. “You’re betting your cards against the school district’s,” he said.

Game theory, a branch of mathematics and economics, is the study of interactive strategies in social settings. Magnet schools in Los Angeles grew out of two things: a court order to desegregate schools and a voter initiative that banned involuntary busing. Forced to devise other ways of integrating schools, the district came up with magnet schools as a way to draw diverse students together voluntarily. With focuses from art to humanities to math-science, L.A’s 155 magnet programs are the jewels of the school district.

In places like New York and San Francisco, students test into elite schools. In Los Angeles, any child can apply to most magnets. Students are admitted--or not--under a complex set of rules. First, schools attempt to balance their student populations ethnically and racially. Although more than one-third of the district’s magnets, like the school system itself, are almost entirely nonwhite, in general the target for magnets is 40% white, 60% other, or 30%-70% if that’s the best the school can do.

Because the demand is greater than the number of spaces at the most desirable schools, the district holds a lottery, randomly assigning the order in which children will be called for a magnet spot. You can move up the line, though, by accumulating priority points. Kids coming from overcrowded schools get four points, as do kids from segregated schools. Three points are awarded to children with a brother or sister already enrolled in the magnet they’ve selected. Children graduating from a magnet school and applying to another magnet get an automatic 12 points. Kids not in magnet schools get four points for each consecutive year they are turned down by a magnet, up to a total of 12 points. The point system is so complex, no computer model could be devised to beat it, Levine says: “To actually try to assess it with a computational or theoretical model would probably be impossible.”

What game theory, and specifically a branch called mechanism design, can do, is analyze the logical consequences of the magnet rules, Levine says. Because race looms so large in the selection process, the first line of strategy is to manipulate your child’s ethnic identity, if you can.

By sheer numbers, white kids in the district would appear to have an advantage, as they are only 10% of the population but would ideally claim 30% to 40% of the magnet seats. But the actual situation is more complicated. A multi-ethnic family, say, that is Caucasian and Latino, might choose to identify the child as Latino in applying to a Westside magnet with a large pool of white applicants. That same child applying to a South Los Angeles magnet with few white students might be better off checking the Caucasian box.

The big sport, though, is the wait-list game. Many parents are happy with their local elementary schools, or anxious to keep young children close to home. But middle school, with its twin threats of drugs and violence, looms on the horizon. “If you show up in L.A. and have no points, you’ll never be able to figure out the system in time to do anything,” he says.

The strategy if you do know the system i s to apply to a program you expect to turn you down. This is the problem of “private information,” Levine says: “The rules were designed to reward families that wanted to get in but didn’t; by doing so they create an incentive for families that do not want to get in to collect the same reward,” he explains. The information is private in that “the true intention of the family--whether they really want to go to a particular school or not--is known to them but not to the school district.”

The district abets this practice by putting out a booklet that lists the number of openings at each magnet, as well as the schools’ applications-to-admissions ratios. Calculating your odds is a snap. The booklet doesn’t break the information down by race, but that’s where the parent underground comes in.

The word in my neighborhood is that white families who want to be wait-listed should apply to Valley Alternative or Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, which Levine calls “key strategic schools.” Non-white parents looking to get turned down and thus build points might be better off applying, say, to 32nd Street/USC Visual and Performing Arts Magnet, which has the longest waiting list for non-white children. And you don’t have to be in public school to play the wait-list game. Many private school parents rack up points in case their kids don’t get into the right middle or high schools.

But wait-list poker is a high-stakes game. As your point total climbs, so does your chance of admission. And if you refuse a magnet opening, you go bust: your wait-list points are forfeited.

Neither the district nor parents, however, have an interest in seeing children take magnet openings they don’t really want. Therefore, an informal admissions process is likely to arise alongside the formal one, Levine says. “The prediction here is that there will be an informal system in which parents who make waves will be admitted over those who do not, and that the school system will deny that such a system exists,” he adds.

And that’s exactly what has happened. A computer downtown makes the first round of assignments, automatically eliminating your wait-list points if you turn down an acceptance. The district, however, saves a few seats in case there are disputes over point totals, etc. Also, since some families are gaming, they will reject their slots. So a second round of admissions ensues, in which employees at the magnets begin calling parents on the waiting list. The list may contain a dozen children with the same number of points, who theoretically should be drafted in an order based on their lottery numbers. But stories abound of parents getting their kids in by pulling strings, by enlisting friends already at the magnet or by hounding officials. And parents whose children are accepted but don’t want to go can sometimes hang on to their wait-list points, either by “neglecting” to return the magnet’s phone calls, or by asking that the magnet employees don’t enter their refusal in the computer downtown.

A particularly fiendish variation of the magnet game is the gifted magnet game. Most L.A. public schools will not test children for gifted status until the second or third grade. But gifted magnets start as early as the first grade. Savvy parents begin pressuring teachers as early as kindergarten to identify children as gifted, or choose schools where they think they can get their child tested. Levine calls this a good “exit strategy.” Some parents deliberately opt for private kindergarten, as first-grade magnets accept teacher and principal recommendations of giftedness, and parents assume that schools they pay will be easier to persuade to give a positive review. “The game is dynamic. Decisions you make today could affect you next year,” Levine says.

Parents who play the system well are usually able to get their children into magnets. But what about the families who don’t play? Or who play badly? Public-school parents are working people, many with only limited English, and it can take years to grasp the niceties of the system. “Not all parents who want to get in will know about the informal system, and so the kids of parents who are more knowledgeable about the system will be admitted over those whose parents are not,” Levine says.

A system this screwy serves no one’s interests, except perhaps those of district officials who can brag about the demand for their marquee programs. Changing the rules won’t help. The real problem is that the magnet system is too small and needs to expand. The district says it can’t afford to, but can we afford to have our children’s schools chosen in a crapshoot--particularly one with loaded dice?